Karl Ristikivi
He orchestrated an impressive cycle of seventeen novels plus other books into a polyphonic unity with a time scale that embraces European history over two millennia.
He obtained some knowledge of literature and history by reading old German books that he found in the attic of a local manor house; although he did not know the language at first, he enjoyed looking at the pictures and asked grown-ups about the meaning of the texts.
The reminiscences of older residents of the city sparked Ristikivi's interest in the first period of urbanization in Estonia at the end of the nineteenth century.
Ristikivi began his literary career writing stories for family magazines, and in the 1930s he published a series of children's books with animal characters: The Flying World ("Lendav maailm", 1935), The Blue Butterfly ("Sinine liblikas", 1936), Pals ("Semud", 1936), and Chums ("Sellid", 1938).
The money he received for these works enabled him to enroll in the department of geography in the faculty of mathematics and natural sciences of the University of Tartu in 1936, where he chose sociology as his main subject.
For those who had been mobilised into the German army, risked deportation to the GULAG or being executed in the event of the Soviet Russian troops reoccupying Estonia.
Around the time that Ristikivi was writing his historical novel about Saint Catherine of Siena (The Bridal Veil op.
But he appears not to have been a very public figure, devoting much of his spare time to writing his novels and other works, and mostly mixing with other exile Estonians in his social life.
It and his next two novels treat the urbanization process as it affected three representative classes of Estonians — workers, merchants, and intellectuals — and comprise what is termed his Tallinn trilogy.
Fire and Iron begins in the 1880s with Jüri Säävel giving up farming and moving to Tallinn, thereby becoming a member of the first urban proletariat in Estonia.
Fire and Iron was the literary event of the year and won first prize in the fiction competition of the publishing house Loodus.
The award money enabled Ristikivi to continue his studies; even more important to the young novelist was a public letter of praise from A. H. Tammsaare, the "living classic" of Estonian literature.
Other influences on Ristikivi's Tallinn trilogy were the novels of Charles Dickens, John Galsworthy, and Thomas Mann and — oddly — the 1933 Hollywood movie Cavalcade.
In In a Strange House Jakob Kadarik, an orphan, is brought up in the household of a rich German merchant who owns a department store in a choice location in Tallinn.
To reward his doggedly faithful service, humility, and business acumen, the merchant gives Jacob the hand of one of his daughters, who would otherwise remain an old maid.
Decades later, life in the Kadarik household is outwardly splendid: Estonia is an independent republic; Estonians have replaced Baltic Germans in business and society; and Jacob now owns the department store.
After the wife dies, the children find her diary, which reveals the ugly truth about her marriage; as a result, they become estranged from their father.
The protagonist of the third novel The Herb Garden, Juulius Kilimit, is the son of a village schoolmaster, lives in something of an aestheticist fantasy world of his own.
While the Estonian literature of the time often portrayed the intellectual with some ridicule, Ristikivi picks his ideals from a symbolic herb garden.
The first of the two novels, All That Ever Was is, not surprisingly under the circumstances, a nostalgic view of Estonia, full of Sundays and the blossom of fruit trees in spring.
The space in which the novel moves is a building in central Stockholm which the protagonist enters on New Year's Eve, hoping to flee the noisy drunken crowds on the streets, but also to attend a concert.
But he ends up wandering up and down this labyrinthine house, meeting people, having desultory conversations, and never fully fitting in or getting into close contact with anyone.
This is followed by a dreamlike court scene which is similar to the one that the old academic, Dr Isak Borg, experiences in the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries (1957).
The Burning Flag describes the life of the young German count Konrad von Hohenstaufen and his attempts to regain control of the Kingdom of Sicily which had once been ruled by his forebears, but his forces suffer defeat and he is killed.
The Last Bastion describes the attempts by Christians to take Acre (also known as Akka or Akkon),[8] and the dramatic events, full of sacrifice, that took place in the Palestine of 1291.
It is an allegory, based in part on the works of famous utopian authors such as Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella, and especially the Platonic idea of a good society.
The second novel of this trilogy, The Song of Joy tells the story of the mediaeval Welsh bard and composer David and asks the question whether the evils of this world can be countered by music.
The Last Trilogy - Noble Hearts or Two Friends in Florence ("Õilsad südamed ehk kaks sõpra Firenzes"; 1970); Dragon's Teeth ("Lohe hambad"; 1970); A Double Game ("Kahekordne mäng"; 1972) As the critic Reet Neithal puts it (op.
The second novel, Dragon's Teeth is set in the Spain and Low Countries of the 16th century, as well as describing the life of a Catalan refugee in Paris in 1949, Joaquim Barrera, whose son Pablo is translating and commenting on his father's trilogy.
In the trilogy, there are two main characters, the idealist Ruy Pons de Granollers is described in the light of political goals and pointless sacrifice, and a more down to earth Fleming, Jan Bleis.
